Delusional Microsoft Is Betting Big Money It Can Out-Search Google

By Phil VillarrealMay 26, 2009

If Microsoft has its way bending your brain with a megabucks ad budget for its forthcoming Bing search engine, someday you’ll replace the verb “googled” with “binged.” Which could give new meaning to the phrase “binged and purged,” but whatever.

Undeterred by previous failures, Microsoft is once again tilting the seemingly all-powerful Google windmill. AdAge reports Microsoft is pushing a towering stack of chips into the betting circle, if nothing else indicating the company believes in its product, which is said to be able to streamline web searches into several concurrent categories that streamline your desired functions and facilitate arrival at applicable destinations. Translation: It finds you your porn quicker.

The software giant is set to launch an $80 million to $100 million campaign for Bing, the search engine it hopes will help it grab a bigger slice of the online ad market. That’s a big campaign — big compared with consumer-product launches ($50 million is considered a sizable budget for a national rollout) and very big when you consider that Google spent about $25 million on all its advertising last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence, with about $11.6 million of that focused on recruiting. Microsoft, by comparison, spent $361 million. Certainly Google has never faced an ad assault of anything like this magnitude.

An early version of Bing, codenamed Kumo, was leaked back in March, so you can read up on it at that link. Or just, you know, Google it.